• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

HBA or Multiple NIC Teamed?

S

servergeek

n00b
Joined
Jul 9, 2014
Messages
3
Hi All,

I am looking for some advice on recommended approach for my home VDI infrastructure as I am somewhat new to Virtualization. The conundrum I am facing is do I go the HBA DAS route or Team multiple NICs. I don’t have any expertise with this stuff so treat me as a noob, no hard feelings. :)

Network Infrastructure:
Cisco Switch: 3550, 48 Ports 10/100 switch
Netgear Switch: GSM7324, 24 Ports 10/1000 Switch
Cisco Router: 2821

Upgrade on the radar: The only thing I am looking to change here is consolidating both switches to Cisco 4948 Gigabit Switch

Server Infrastructure:
Supermicro 24Bay File Server:
OS: Windows Server 2012 R2
Storage: Close to 20TB of storage running in non-raid format
Chassis : Supermicro 846TQ-R900B 4U 24 Bay Redundant 900-watt Power Supplies
Board: Supermicro H8DME-2 Dual Opteron Motherboard with 32GB of RAM and Dual NIC
Raid Controller: 3 x AOC-SAT2-MV8 8 Port Software RAID Controller
Processor: 2 x AMD Opteron 2374HE 2.2Ghz Quad Core CPU

Upgrade on the radar:
Switch backplane or server out for 6Gbs HDD support. Another 24 or 36 Bay if I go the server route
20-24 Hitachi 2TB HDD or 4 SSD drives if I only purchase 20 HDD
1 or 2 Quad port NIC or HBA route

HP Dl585 G6
Detail Machine Spec: http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c04286599
OS: Windows Server 2012 R2
Role: Hyper-V server running 11 Windows virtual machines
Memory: 64GB of RAM
Processor: 4 AMD Opteron 2.8GHz, Six-Core Processors
HDD: 8X 300GB SAS Drives, 2 HDD for OS mirrored, 1 HDD VM , 5 HDD in Raid 5 mode for VM’s
NIC: 2 Quad port NIC, 2 NIC teamed for Servers, 2 NIC teamed for Clients, 1 NIC for external VPN IP addresses and 1 NIC for Internal VPN IP addresses

Upgrade on the radar: HBA

HPDL385 G6
Detail Machine Spec: http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c04286596
OS: ESX 5.5
Role: VMware server to be used for Linux and Unix virtual machines
Memory: 64GB of RAM
Processor: 2 AMD Opteron 2.3GHz, Six-Core Processors
HDD: 3X 146GB SAS Drives, 2 HDD for OS mirrored, 1 HDD for VM
NIC: 4 embedded NIC

Upgrade on the radar:
Add additional SAS drives
1 or 2 Quad NIC or HBA

Thanks,
Servergeek
 
For me, the short answer is that the HBA will be easier and simpler for a home lab setup, but the teamed NIC approach will be a more "real world" type of scenario - at least that is how it is in my experience.

I am much more of a VMware guy, but Hyper-V and SMB 3.0 with Cluster Shared Volumes is a very cool approach to storage that you will want to work with and investigate. Generally if you want to go beyond a couple of hosts with shared storage you will need to use NICs instead of HBAs.
 
I definitely like the NIC approach as i have tested it with hyper-v and know it works. Also, knowing I will be upgrading the core switch to a high buffer rate type switch, I am more leaning towards the NIC route.

The SAS price per gigabyte/performance is killing me and I wasn't sure if a shared storage environment would be better performance wise so I still have some research to do there.

My home lab is more a Windows shop, but looking to learn more about Linux/Unix and vmware hence the dl385 server.

thanks for your info.
 
FWIW, we don't use HBAs in production because there's not enough room to have redundant HBAs and redundant NICs. Then again, we also don't run Amazon or Bank of America on our systems.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top